How a Portland ad shop's Star Wars project got J.J. Abrams' attention

Be honest. You don’t want J.J. Abrams to screw up the next set of Star Wars flicks either, right?

The folks at Portland creative shop Sincerely Truman don’t either, so they did what they do best: Make a 2D animation video taking the issue to Abrams -- the proclaimed director and producer who’s taking control of the vaunted sci-fi series -- directly with a website and YouTube video.

The video “4 Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again” posted Thursday on YouTube and the site Dearjjabrams.com and as of Monday had accrued nearly 600,000 page views.

If you’ve never heard of Sincerely Truman, it’s because the name is new.

The company is a spinoff from Epipheo, a 100-person company split between Cincinnati and a Portland operation that was once housed in the offices of the Portland Incubator Experiment.

Epipheo CEO Dustin Evans said the 70-person Cincinnati office is a specialist in 2D explainer videos. The Portland office worked more on the commercial side, helping major brands -- its client list includes Visa, Nike, KEEN, and Cisco Systems -- tell their stories.

The 30-person Portland office in September spun off into a separate entity called Sincerely Truman, with Evans serving as managing director.

The Star Wars video was sort of its coming out party.

I asked Evans on Monday about the genesis of the Star Wars project, what he hopes comes from it, and the story behind his company’s name.

Portland Business Journal: The JJ Abrams/Star Wars site will certainly get a lot of attention. What’s the story behind it?

Dustin Evans: We’ve been here in Portland for a couple years now and I’ve been the CEO of a company called Epiphio with one office in Portland, and one in Cincinnati. We started a couple of months ago to break them off and rebrand and relaunch (the Portland office) as Sincerely Truman. The Star Wars thing came when just a few of our folks internally started talking about Star Wars. We got excited about the new ones coming out and we’re like,”We really want those things to be good again.” It was an internal passion project from (senior producer) Prescott Harvey, who wrote the script. It was our internal team supporting it and figuring, “let’s do it together.” When it got finished, when we were relaunching Sincerely Truman, we thought, “This is a good opportunity.” It will get a lot of views. So we just thought we could get people on our site.

PBJ: So you want to go pitch this to JJ Abrams?

Evans: J.J.’s production company reached out on Friday of last week to get Prescott’s information to give to J.J.

PBJ: Where do you think that will go?

Evans: I have no idea. We’ve launched a bunch of videos that have gotten quite a few views. Our first company, Epipheo, did a video for Google and it was right when (messaging service) Google Wave launched. Google was on a climb at the time. We said, “We’ve always been driven by communication and storytelling,” so we crafted this video and posted it to YouTube and it was just crazy. It was what launched Epiphio, which now is about 100 people. When we created this video, there’s always those videos that you see that you have a greater sense of confidence it will be shareable. This is one of those pieces. I have no idea what will happen with J.J., but my sense is he’s had his eyes on it.

PBJ: What do you hope happens with your new brand as a result of this?

Evans: There’s two things we cared about. The first thing was that a couple of our folks just got passionate about something and we wanted to support it. That was our very first intent, to support our team. The second thing is, we just hope that people see us as really great storytellers, dedicated to truthful communication. We have a list of really big clients. We’ve been kind of quiet here in Portland the last couple of years. It’s a fun way to say hello to the neighborhood.

PBJ: What’s the story behind the name Sincerely Truman?

Evans: We did an internal survey among our 30 people in Portland and we asked questions like, “What’s our true value?” one of the things that rose to the top is this true human communication. The idea that so much happens in the digital world that there’s still a lot of value in talking to humans. The other thing we came up with is this idea of being on the consistent pursuit of truth. Advertising is so littered with made-up positioning statements, we wanted to bring truth to humans. Truman came out of that.